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It's always sad to watch these apps go through the phases of their lifecycle that seem like inevitable steps at this point. It's all fun and games in the early
by ve55 5y ago
It's always sad to watch these apps go through the phases of their lifecycle that seem like inevitable steps at this point. It's all fun and games in the early days, but eventually the incentive structures that watch over us begin to deteriorate user experience and increase hostility, whether it's via more advertising, invasive privacy measures, or worsening content restrictions and censorship. It seems inevitable that these things start getting worse as an online ecosystem scales up to massive numbers of users.
It often reminds me of platforms that try to stand out and be different from the others by empowering users in various ways, and this works at the start, but as they get millions of users they realize the other platforms acted as they did not out of choice, but out of force. You have to comply with app store guidelines, payment processor requests, banks, various world government(s), profit models that actually work, and so on, and before you know it you've become the very thing you sought to disrupt and are no different than every other major social platform with >100M users.
- nonbirithm 5y agoI don't know why, but for some reason I'm reminded of the Fermi Paradox after wondering why all of the technological process and app degradation is all happening now in a very recent timespan of a few decades. As in, why was I one of the people who was alive to witness the birth of the Internet, a massively influential point in human history, only a few decades ago? Maybe it's because when communication methods are discovered, humans inevitably want to perfect them, and the attempts to reach perfection have various consequences in a short period of time. There might not have been anything that could have prevented the creation of Facebook and such if humans discovered that it was possible to create such things. I have this weird thought (from a fictional standpoint) that maybe all the adware and other bloat is rapidly converging on an inflection point that will cause some kind of technological collapse where we will have to start over from some earlier reference point, due to sentient AI or something. But I wouldn't know how, exactly. It might make for a mildly interesting SF plot point.
- progval 5y ago> It might make for a mildly interesting SF plot point. https://qntm.org/structure https://qntm.org/structure It's also a minor plot point in Anathem by Neal Stephenson
- e3bc54b2 5y agoYou are right, and that is why niche, tightly coupled communities will always remain superior in UX and content over the "mainstream/lowest-common-denominator" ones. Unfortunately, these smaller communities have more churn to them as the bedrock contributors fall out for various reasons, and then its on to next. But at least we now know the cycle of life, and more importantly, what to stay away from.